Macedonia, the truth

FYROM: Searching for a Name, and Problems
with the Expropriation of History
George C. Papavizas
Eleven years after Josip Broz Tito’s communist regime ended with his death
in 1980, and following the breakup of Yugoslavia, an unusually disturbing
event occurred for the Balkans, especially for Greece. On 17 September 1991,
Tito’s Socialist Republic of Macedonia was converted by Skopje’s communist
politicians into an independent state with the name “Republic of Macedonia”
(Republika Makedonija).
Immediately after its secession from Yugoslavia, the new republic — known
as Vardarska Banovina (or Vardar Province) from 1929 to 1944 and Paionia
in antiquity — beguiled by the absurdity of age-old historical distortions,
revealed its irredentist aspirations in the first draft of its constitution. Articles
3 and 49 of the constitution’s preamble announced that the boundaries of the
new republic also included Greek Macedonia (Greece owns 75 percent of
King Philip’s and Alexander’s historic Macedonia). Following Greece’s stren-
uous objections, the new republic moderated its claims somewhat in January
1992 and deleted the reference to Greek Macedonia in the second draft. The
final draft included an appeal to the “Macedonians” of Greece to continue
their ethnic struggle for union with the new “Macedonia,” an addition imply-
ing a future threat against Greece’s territorial integrity.
Mediterranean Quarterly 21:3 DOI 10.1215/10474552-2010-017
Copyright 2010 by Mediterranean Affairs, Inc.
The expressions “Macedonia” and “Macedonians” in quotation marks refer to the way FYROM uses
the words to connote the ethnic significance of the republic (a concept disputed in this article).
George C. Papavizas is a retired research scientist of the US Department of Agricultures Agri-
cultural Research Service. He is the author of Blood and Tears, Greece 1940 – 1949 (2002) and
Claiming Macedonia: The Struggle for the Heritage, Territory, and Name of the Historic Hellenic
Land, 1862 – 2004 (2006). Parts of this article were published by the National Herald, 24 Febru-
ary 2009 and 1 August 2009. The views expressed in this article are personal.

Half a century earlier, Greece’s neighbor had harbored some of the most
important military bases and training camps, including one in its capital,
Skopje, supporting the Communist Party of Greece’s sedition against the
Greek government during the deadly Greek Civil War of 1946 – 9. It was
obvious from the beginning of the new state’s independence that Hellenic
Macedonianism was targeted for a sharp political and diplomatic attack. The
new republic’s administration, claiming now that its Slavic inhabitants are
“Macedonians,” and the only ones in the Balkans, is determined to continue
stirring political, demographic, and territorial problems for the foreseeable
future, outside of or under a North Atlantic Treaty Organization umbrella.
Because Greece has also maintained that the small state’s name of “Mace-
donia” and its constitution implicitly invoke claims to the Greek part of the
historic region of Macedonia, including its capital, Thessaloniki (Salonika),
the United Nations Security Council accepted the new state on 7 April 1993
as a member of the UN with the name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedo-
nia (FYROM) until a mutually acceptable name could be negotiated between
Athens and Skopje. The negotiations were first mediated by the late Cyrus
Vance, and currently they are mediated by his successor, Matthew Nimetz,
both appointed by the UN secretary-general. Since Nimetz believes that the
problem can be resolved through “statesmanship” in Athens and Skopje, he
has made several recommendations for a permanent name to resolve the lin-
gering problem.
No name acceptable to both Greece and FYROM has been found after
seventeen years of negotiations. Greece appears to be willing to accept a
name with geographic meaning, such as “Republic of North Macedonia,” or
a composite name, such as “Republic of Slavomacedonia,” but the two names
are unacceptable to Skopje.
After the Athens-Skopje enmity over the name “Macedonia” smoldered
for four acrimonious years, on 13 September 1995 Greece and FYROM,
under the UN auspices, signed a so-called Interim Accord. Greece accepted
FYROM as an independent and sovereign state and agreed to establish
diplomatic relations with Skopje. FYROM removed the Sun of Vergina (an
ancient Greek Macedonian symbol found in Vergina, Greece) from its flag
and public buildings and agreed that nothing in its constitution can or should
be interpreted as constituting, or will ever constitute, the basis of any claim
Papavizas: FYROM 87

88 Mediterranean Quarterly: Summer 2010
by FYROM to any territory not within its existing borders. It agreed to not
interfere in the internal affairs of another state to protect the status and rights
of any persons in other states who are not citizens of FYROM. The two coun-
tries also agreed to take effective measures to prohibit hostile activities or
propaganda by state-controlled agencies and public institutions.
Greece fulfilled all its obligations under the agreement. From 1995 to the
present (2010), Greece has encouraged investments in FYROM of more than
€1 billion by private Greek persons or institutions. (By 2002, 80 percent
of the FYROM economy was controlled or sustained by Greek interests.) It
allows FYROM’s commerce to move through the Greek port of Thessaloniki.
It helped FYROM enter several international organizations, including the
all-important Stabilization and Association Agreement with the European
Union. It included FYROM in the five-year Greek Plan of Economic Recon-
struction of the Balkans and supported its entrance into the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization’s Partnership for Peace. It signed an agreement of mili-
tary cooperation with FYROM that allowed high-ranking FYROM military
leaders to participate in the multiethnic Center of Military Training in the
Greek city of Kilkis and granted scholarships to FYROM military personnel
to attend a military school in Greece. And it stood politically and financially
by the FYROM government during its nationalist clash with the local Alba-
nian minority in 2001.1
In contrast, FYROM violated basic norms of international behavior
and almost every provision of the Interim Accord, paying Greece back for
its assistance and generosity with a constant barrage of anti-Hellenic pro-
paganda, provocations in the media and on the Internet, and distortions of
history. It accused Greece of unjustifiably using the name “Macedonia” and
it printed school books and pseudo-bank notes depicting Greek heroes as
FYROM heroes and Greek landmarks as FYROM landmarks. It also circu-
lated maps showing itself as part of a “Greater Macedonia,” including Greek
Macedonia — with Thessaloniki — down to Mt. Olympus. It used its member-
ship status in the Council of Europe in 1995 to promote its nationalist aims,
including “redemption” of the “Macedonian minorities” in Greece.
1. Evangelos Kofos and Vlasis Vlasides, eds., Athens-Skopje: Seven Years of Symbiosis (1995 – 2002)
(Athens: Papazisi, 2003).

Papavizas: FYROM 89Papavizas: FYROM 89
To provoke Greece, FYROM renamed the airport in Skopje Alexander the
Great Airport. It inculcated in young minds the defunct communist expan-
sionist tendencies and the idea to hate Greeks, a violation of Article 7 of the
Interim Accord. Worst of all, it violated Article 11 of the accord, which states
that FYROM may not use any name other than “FYROM,” its temporary
name, until an agreement is reached on the name.
Because of its multiethnic structure and proximity to four Balkan countries
of diverse ethnological and religious composition, FYROM could have become
from the outset a serious link, playing an important constructive and medi-
ating role among its neighbors. Because of several systemic weaknesses —
past tendencies and habits acquired during fifty years under a dictatorial
regime — however, the new state may become a destabilizing force in the
Balkans, especially if it continues to pursue the present uncompromising
policies in its relations with the neighbors.
In this essay I examine FYROM’s relations with Greece, its most impor-
tant neighbor, the country that assisted FYROM politically and financially
from the outset, despite the differences the two counties have on the use of
the name “Macedonia.”
Historical Perspective
In light of diverse views on FYROM’s right to the name “Macedonia,” any
solution to the ongoing conflict (known historically as the Macedonian Prob-
lem) must address historical truth and the historical background, the essence
of which has been FYROM’s intensive efforts to expropriate a name that
Greece has been using for more than three millennia and still uses for one of
its largest territories, adjacent to FYROM. Simply stated, the FYROM regime
is violating well-established historical tenets by using Macedonian Helle-
nism’s names and symbols. The small country, representing a small part of a
larger whole country — less than 20 percent of Philip’s historic Macedonia —
portrays itself as representing the entire Macedonia. Its claims for an exclu-
sive Macedonian identity have intensified since the United States under
President George W. Bush recognized FYROM as the “Republic of Macedo-
nia” in 2004, and more so since Greece objected to FYROM’s entrance into
NATO in April 2008. Greece objects to FYROM’s arrogation of the rights of

2. Thousands of FYROM Slavs, including Ljupko Georgijevski, former prime minister and presi-
dent of the Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, rushed to acquire Bulgar-
ian citizenship during the past few years.
the citizens of Greece, which own the largest part of historic Macedonia, and
especially to FYROM’s infringement of the rights of Hellenic Macedonians
of countless generations, whose Macedonianism has become an integral part
of their ethnic identity.
To understand the complexity of the Macedonian problem, we must go
back to the year 1862 — the year of appointment of the pro-Bulgarian Count
Nikolai Ignatieff as the Russian ambassador to the Ottoman government — to
trace the origin and the reasons for the struggle for Macedonia under the
Ottomans between two protagonists, Greeks and Bulgarians, not between
Greeks and “Macedonians.” During the intensified struggle for Macedonia’s
liberation from the Ottomans in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Bulgarism
represented Slavism, not Macedonianism. The Greeks and the Bulgarians
viewed the enslaved land of Philip and Alexander as a region that one day
would become part of an enlarged Greece or Bulgaria, respectively. Like-
wise, the southern Serbs demanded more territory, but they had no particular
interest in claiming a Macedonian identity. Macedonianism as an indepen-
dent and exclusive ethnic concept had not yet been invented by the pre-Tito
Slavs. It had to wait for seventy-five years (1870 to 1945) to be propelled by
Tito’s communist regime.
To put the Slavic “Macedonian” ethnogenesis and the rise of false Slavic
Macedonianism into proper perspective, we must also go back to 1862 and
trace the origin and sentiments of FYROM’s Slav speakers and their ethnic
transformations through the years before their final communist-controlled
conversion to “Macedonians.” They were Bulgarians from 1862 to 1913 and
Serbianized Slavs from 1913 until the German occupation of Yugoslavia in
1941. Bulgarians again proudly brandished Bulgarian and Nazi German
flags during the occupation of southern Yugoslavia by the fascist Bulgarian
army (a Hitler gift to Bulgaria for joining Nazi Germany during World War
II). They were Yugoslav communist partisans during the occupation and,
finally, communist “Macedonians” by 1945, with new roots, history, and a
new “Macedonian” language, a modification of the Bulgarian language by
Tito’s communist regime.2

Looking beyond FYROM’s actions — the recent intense campaign by the
present nationalist leadership in Skopje, claiming an exclusive “Macedonian”
identity; the touting of FYROM’s Bulgarian dialect as a “Macedonian” lan-
guage; the continuing nonsensical propaganda against Greece; the numerous
violations of the Interim Accord by FYROM; and history’s distortions — who
was responsible for the transformation of the southern Slavs into “Macedo-
nians” and the appropriation by the Slavs of the name “Macedonia” and its
derivatives used by Greece for three thousand years? How did the political
decision emerge for the creation of an exclusive “Macedonian” identity from
Vardar Province’s Slavs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbs, Greeks, and others?
The historical guilt for launching a state with a name that a neighbor has
been using for three millennia must first and foremost burden the reformed
communist leaders in Skopje who created it in 1991. They could have written
a constitution friendly to their neighbors, making an auspicious beginning
by choosing a neutral name (for example, Republic of Paionia or Republic
of Vardar) that would not offend their neighbors. The historical guilt also
belongs to the Europeans and Americans who, to expedite Yugoslavia’s dis-
solution, embraced the fledgling country with a historic name from the long
past of one of its neighboring countries. The Europeans and the Americans
did it for expediency, ignoring three thousand years of history.
Documents available now lead to another indisputable conclusion: Tito’s
ideologically Marxist authoritarian regime, assisted by Joseph Stalin and by
two infamous organizations — the Comintern and the Balkan Communist
Federation — are also responsible. The Marxist revolutionary theory on eth-
nic minorities, cleverly adjusted by Lenin and Stalin to compromise the prin-
ciples of communist internationalism with their own national aspirations, was
also responsible. History knows that the “Macedonianism” of Vardar Prov-
ince’s Slav-speakers is based exclusively on the role played by communism
when in the early 1940s the Slavs were transformed by Tito into “Macedo-
nians” for political reasons.
Today, the dispute between Greece and FYROM goes deeper than the
use of the name “Macedonia” by FYROM. It is a double-pronged attempt
by FYROM to (1) establish kinship between ancient Macedonians and
FYROM’s southern Slavs and create and propagate a Slav “Macedonian-
ism” and a “Macedonian” national consciousness in the small country; and

(2) intensify its historical revisionism and propaganda barrage to discredit
the Macedonian Hellenism and claim the glorious Macedonian inheritance.
No Kinship
The area north of Mt. Barnous and Mt. Orbelos and south of Kosovo (north of
historic Macedonia), known from 1929 to 1944 as Vardar Province and today
as FYROM, was known in antiquity as Paionia or Paeonia (Greek: Παιoνrα)
and its people as Paionians. The Paionians may have been of Hellenic stock,
but not much is known about them because, as Irwin L. Merker has stated,
“No Paionian Philip ever dominated Greece, and no Paionian Alexander ever
conquered the known world.” The Paionians were subdued by King Philip II
in 359 BC and fought later with Alexander the Great against the Persians.
Under the Macedonians, they had a degree of autonomy and were eventually
assimilated by the Macedonians and Hellenized.3
Vardar Province of Yugoslavia was always an unstable country inhabited
by several ideologically quarrelsome groups with ties to Albania, Bulgaria, or
Serbia. The 1940 Yugoslavian census recognized only three ethnic groups in
Vardar Province: Slavs, at 66 percent; Muslims, at 31 percent; and Greeks, at
3 percent. In 1946, two years after its conversion to the People’s Republic of
Macedonia by Tito, the Slavs and Greeks disappeared from the census, which
suddenly showed 66 percent “Macedonians” and 29 percent Albanians. Was
this remarkable transformation process an en masse genetic mutation of the
Bulgarians and southern Slavs or a deliberate census falsification? The world,
recovering from a long war, did not question the dramatic change.
Historical facts and archaeological findings in Macedonia, Egypt, and Asia
reveal no kinship between ancient Macedonians and the FYROM Slavs and
Bulgarians of Tito’s new republic. (Bulgaria insists that the FYROM Slavs
are actually Bulgarians, a claim fueling the present underground quarrel
between Sofia and Skopje.) Likewise, the linguistic trends do not support the
“Macedonian” ethnic identity claimed by the Slavic population. To promote
the alleged existence of a separate Macedonian ethnicity and build a base for
future territorial claims, history revisionists in FYROM and organizations of
3. Irwin L. Merker, “The Ancient Kingdom of Paionia,” Balkan Studies 6 (1965): 35 – 54.

4. M. Nystazopoulos-Pelekidou, The Macedonian Problem (Athens: Association of National Studies
of Southern Europe, 1988), 10 – 5.
5. George C. Papavizas, Claiming Macedonia: The Struggle for the Heritage, Territory, and Name
of the Historical Hellenic Land, 1862 – 2004 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 159 – 61.
the Slavic diaspora have propelled the “amalgamation theory” to establish
such a connection and to de-Slavisize their ancestral Slavic identity and his-
tory.4 The theory attracted a few followers abroad, especially among Slavs in
the United States, Australia, and Canada.
According to this theory, a Macedonian is a “completely modern product”
of racial amalgamation between the southern Slavic people and a mixture
of indigenous descendants of ancient Macedonians and other inhabitants of
Macedonia.5 During the Middle Ages, the theory claims, the Slavs annihi-
lated many local people in Macedonia and absorbed the remainder. From
the blend of the Slavic element and the descendants of Macedonians, a new
“Macedonian” nation emerged related to ancient Macedonia. The theory is
part of the regular curriculum in FYROM schools today to indoctrinate stu-
dents to believe they are descendants of ancient Macedonians.
FYROM historians and Slavic population geneticists have no grounds to
support their theory, which is based on serious historical errors. Even if we tem-
porarily accept that this theory is correct, precisely who were the local Greek
speakers and the Slav-speakers with genuine Hellenic sentiments in Mace-
donia at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twen-
tieth, who fought valiantly for Hellenism in Turkish-occupied Macedonia —
together with volunteers from free Greece — against the Bulgarians, winning
the Macedonian Struggle of 1904 – 8? What are the people in Greek Mace-
donia today whose forefathers lived in Macedonia for centuries, surviving the
harsh Ottoman occupation?
In the end, the difficulty in accepting the amalgamation model is insur-
mountable also because the emotional justification provided by FYROM his-
torians to remedy their identity crisis is unconvincing. Unless they are com-
pletely isolated, human populations do not survive genetically unaltered for a
millennium — and the Macedonians were not isolated. Under the influence of
the common Greek dialect (the koine) and the sharing of myths, customs, and
religion, the Macedonians were amalgamated with the rest of the Hellenes,
and modern Greeks were produced.

We must also add some familiar facts. Alexander the Great died in 323
BC, and the Slavs did not migrate into the Balkan Peninsula until the seventh
century AD, almost a millennium later. If we accept the historically unac-
ceptable view that the Macedonians were not Greek, but were Hellenized by
the middle of the fifth century,6 then the ancient Macedonians, whatever their
ethnicity was, had better chances, a common language, and a thousand-year
span to blend with other Greeks, rather than wait all those long years for the
Slav-speaking “suitors” from the north.
Given the seriousness of the amalgamation theory dispute, and the inau-
thentic assertions by its proponents, two important questions must also be
answered convincingly if there is even a slim chance for this theory to be con-
sidered seriously. Why had the southern Slavs considered themselves “Bulgar-
ians” for seventy-five years (1870 to 1945)? Why did they not claim a Mace-
donian identity instead of fighting only to incorporate Macedonia into Bulgaria
in the likely event of a collapse of the Turkish occupation of Macedonia?
The answers to the questions given by FYROM historians are rife with
obvious shortcomings. They insist that the southern Slavic people, being illit-
erate during the early years of the Macedonian controversy, did not know
what their ethnicity was, an unconvincing explanation, especially because
the founders of the Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organiza-
tion in 1893 were not illiterate. Damien Gruff was a schoolmaster and Christo
Tatarcheff a doctor.7 FYROM’s superficial answer to the second question is
that the Slavs affiliated themselves with Bulgaria because of its activist pol-
icy and its dynamic handling of the Macedonian Problem. Eventually, they
eradicated the Bulgarian sentiments and became “Macedonians.”
Discrediting the Macedonian Hellenism
According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, “Unlike Serbia’s
Kosovo story, based on centuries of poetry and legend, the Macedonian ide-
ology [of FYROM] is being both invented and presented at the same time.
There is no outside scholarly consensus, no textual tradition; the result is a
6. Eugene N. Borza, In the Shadow of Olympus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
7. Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia: 1897 – 1913 (Thessaloniki: Museum of the
Macedonian Struggle, Institute for Balkan Studies, 1966).

kind of history-free history. The top-down, debate-free imposition of the new
history is itself seen as illiberal and authoritarian.”8
To crown its proclivity in using unfounded historical information to sup-
port exclusive rights to “Macedonianism” and an exclusive “Macedonian”
identity, FYROM has intensified its “illiberal and authoritarian” history revi-
sionism to discredit the Macedonian Hellenism. The historically, linguisti-
cally, and archaeologically incorrect challenges to Greece, emanating from
Skopje and from its supporters around the world, are that ancient Macedonia
was never part of Greece and the Macedonians were barbarians who spoke a
language incomprehensible to the other Greeks.
It is true that ancient Macedonia was not part of Greece. It is also true that
Attica, Lacedaemon, Epirus, Aetolia, Akarnania, Corinth, and all the other
Greek city-states did not belong to Greece, because Greece did not exist as
a single, united state. Before the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, the Hel-
lenic nation existed as city-states speaking more than two hundred dialects
of the Greek language. Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, was the first
who attempted, by conquest or alliances, to unite the city-states into a single
country, Greece. He succeeded to a major extent, but the unity was short
lived.
Differing perceptions of the Macedonians’ Hellenism are inevitable, and so
is the significance attributed by some historians to the accusations by other
Greeks of antiquity that the Macedonians were “barbarians.” Political fabri-
cations in Athens based not on ethnicity or language but on the Macedonian
way of life were the reasons for the name calling — and also because Philip
and his son, Alexander, provoked the enmity of the Athenians, especially
Demosthenes, the orator who shamelessly assailed the Macedonians. Even
doubters of the Macedonian Hellenism concluded that name calling “might
have been no more than invective by angry orators unrelated to historical
facts”9 or “oratory designed to sway public opinion at Athens and thereby to
formulate public policy.”10
8. Robert Marquand, “Twenty-three Hundred Years Later, ‘Alexander-Mania’ Grips Macedonia,”
Christian Science Monitor, 20 March 2009.
9. Ernst Badian, “Greeks and Macedonians,” in Macedonia and Greece in Late Classical and Early
Hellenic Times: Studies in the History of Art, vol. 10, ed. B. Barr-Sharrar and E. N. Borza (Wash-
ington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 33 – 51.
10. Borza.

Not all the Athenian orators and writers were against Philip and the Mace-
donians. The conservative educator Isocrates insisted that the Greek city-
states must unite. For four decades he urged the Greeks to abandon their
petty quarrels, advocating a pan-Hellenic crusade against Greece’s arch
enemy, the Persian Empire. When his pleas fell on deaf ears, he turned his
attention to a strong leader, Philip of Macedon, urging him repeatedly to unite
the city-states and guide them against the Persians. Would a renowned Athe-
nian educator like Isocrates, then the most famous, successful, and influen-
tial Athenian, favor Philip to unite the Greeks if the Macedonians were non-
Greek? No one accused Isocrates of lacking patriotism.
More than anything else the language of the Macedonians — a charac-
teristic of ethnicity — became the subject of disagreements among scholars.
The important fact, relative to the ancient Greek world, intricately related to
linguistics and the ancient Macedonians’ ethnicity, is the existence of hun-
dreds of Hellenic tribes, subtribes, and families of the Hellenic nation.11 The
fragmented nation spoke about two hundred dialects and idioms, often indi-
cated by names describing the manner of speaking: atticisti, doristi, ionisti,
laconisti, makedonisti, and so forth.12 The structure of each dialect and the
manner of speaking reflected the level of civilization of each tribe or state.
The nomad inhabitants of a monarchical regime like ancient Macedonia
could hardly be expected to speak the refined dialect of Athens. The Mace-
donian dialect was incomprehensible to the Athenians, but not to the Aeto-
lians and Akarnanians.
The lack of linguistic homogeneity in the ancient Greek world has been
a source of perplexity to some doubting scholars, and also the reason for
suggesting that the Macedonian dialect was incomprehensible to the other
Greeks. Eugene Borza wrote that the language of the Macedonian elite was
standard Greek dialect since the middle of the fifth century BC, but the com-
mon people spoke an unknown dialect beyond recovery. He also speculated
that the common peoples’ dialect declined with time and was replaced by the
standard koine.13
11. Marcus Templar, “Fallacies and Facts on the Macedonian Issue,” Pan-Macedonian Association
USA, 2003, www.panmacedonian.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm.
12. Nicholas G. L. Hammond, The Macedonian State: The Origins, Institutions, and History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
13. Borza.

If the Macedonian dialect is beyond recovery, how do we know it was not
Hellenic? There is no evidence it was not Hellenic, but there is abundant
evidence it was Hellenic. It is also more logical to assume that the Mace-
donian dialect had many similarities with the official Greek dialect than to
believe that the Macedonian officials spoke Greek and the remainder of the
population — with Greek names, living in cities with Greek names, and using
Greek-inscribed coins, statues, gravestones, and frescoes — spoke an incom-
prehensible, alien dialect.
Hellenization of the upper Macedonian class by the middle of the fifth
century BC, as suggested by Borza, may never have occurred in the basic
sense of the term. After all, the Macedonians were one of the Hellenic tribes
to begin with, and therefore, only evolution of the archaic Macedonian dia-
lect (Doric Hellenic of the western type) occurred. The evolutionary process
of the proto glossic (first) Hellenic elements took place successfully, simply
because the Macedonians were prone to gradually embracing the sophisti-
cated linguistic elements that brought their dialect close to the Attic, cul-
minating with the formation of the final product, the koine, in Philip’s and
Alexander’s time. Nothing like that occurred with the non-Greek Illyrians,
despite their proximity to the Greek world, simply because their tongue had
no linguistic affinity to Hellenic dialects.
Knowledge of the ancient Macedonian dialect is limited because there
are no surviving texts written in the dialect. But authentic words have been
assembled and documented, mainly from inscriptions on coins, statues,
gravestones, lead, and papyrus plates, and from the fifth-century lexicon of
Haesychius of Alexandria, amounting to 176 words and more than 200 proper
names. The majority of these words have been identified as Greek.
Proving that the common Macedonians spoke a Hellenic dialect before
the middle of the fifth century BC, the proposed date of the Macedonians’
Hellenization, will be the decisive key to clinching the proof that the Mace-
donians were Greek all the way back to the Dark Ages (the five centuries
following the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, 1100 – 700 BC) and
beyond.
There is now evidence to suggest that the Macedonians spoke a proto-
Hellenic dialect before the fifth century BC. During the Dark Ages, before
the reign of the Macedonian King Perdikkas I (circa 650 BC), Macedonia had

several Greek names.14 The first known name was Emathia, after its leader
Emathion. Later it became Maketia or Makessa, and finally Macedonia. The
words Makedonia and makedvós (tall) are derived from the very ancient word
macos (in Attic, mecos means length), a word used today in Greece, found for
the first time in the Homeric poems as “oro τε φbλλα μακεδνRς αιγεrρoιo”
(look at the leaves of tall poplars). If the Macedonians were not Greek, would
they have used a Greek name for their country?
The Macedonian dialect maintained the characteristics and peculiarities
of the Homeric times that distinguished it from the Greek dialect spoken in
Athens. It also preserved features that had disappeared from other Hellenic
dialects, demonstrated by the fact that Roman and Byzantine lexicographers
and grammarians used examples from the Macedonian dialect to interpret
difficult features of the Homeric poems. Common characters also existed in
the Macedonian that had been differentiated from before Homer, suggesting
again that the Macedonians were speaking a proto-Hellenic dialect at about
1200 – 800 BC.
Borza, the scholar who expressed doubts on the Hellenic identity of the
common Macedonians, admitted that “the ‘Macedones’ or ‘highlanders’ of
mountainous western Macedonia have been derived from a northwestern
Greek stock. That is, northwestern Greece provided a pool of Indo-European
speakers of proto-Greek from which emerged the tribes which later became
known by different names as they established their regional identities in sep-
arate parts of the country.”15
That the Macedonians spoke a Hellenic dialect before the middle of the
fifth century BC is also shown by the fact that the Macedonian dialect con-
tained Greek words not found in other Greek dialects. Since the Macedonians
were using these words before the fifth century BC, where did they come
from? The following words did not exist in other Greek dialects, yet they were
used by the Macedonians before and after the middle of the fifth century BC:
Alexander, Alketas, Philippos, Orestis, Makedon, Ptolemy, Antigonos, Amyn-
tas, Perdikkas, Krateros, Parmenion, Makedonia, Emathia, Pieria, Dion,
Aliakmon, Almopia, Lyncestis, Elimeia, and others. Also, Ulrich Kohler
14. Templar, “Fallacies and Facts.”
15. Borza, 78.

wrote about cities in central Macedonia built with Greek names not found
in other Greek dialects before the fifth century BC: Atalanti, Eidomenai,
Europos, Aeane, and Aegae.16
In 1987 a remarkable inscription on a lead tablet dating to the fourth cen-
tury BC was excavated in Pella (capital of ancient Macedonia) forty miles
west of Thessaloniki, Greece. Known as the Pella Katadesmos, the tablet
is a curse or magic spell written by a woman of low social status as evi-
denced by her vocabulary and belief in magic.17 Written on lead, stone, or
baked clay, the Katadesmoi were spells secretly buried to ensure the writer’s
physical integrity and guarantee the accomplishment of the intended spell or
curse. The language on the tablet is harsh, but it is a distinctly recognizable
form of Doric Greek, suggesting that the common people of Macedonia were
speaking a Doric Greek dialect of the northwestern type. The French scholar
Olivier Masson, who examined the tablet, wrote in the third edition of the
classical Oxford Classical Dictionary: “We may conclude that the Macedo-
nian is a dialect related to North-Western Greek. This view is supported by
the recent discovery of a curse tablet which may well be the first ‘Macedo-
nian’ text attested.”18
I spent two years studying the language of ancient Macedonians. Of
eleven scholars I studied, only two expressed doubts on the Macedonians’
language being Greek: K. O. Müller suggested it was Illyrian mixed with
Greek words,19 and Gustav Weigand believed that it was a sibling language
to all of the Greek dialects, but not a genuine Greek dialect.20 Antoine Meil-
let was neutral, suggesting that the Macedonian dialect was an independent
Indo-European language close to Greek.21 Von Otto Hoffman concluded that
16. Ulrich Kohler, “Minutes, Berlin Academy: 1897,” 270, cited in George Hadjidakis, About the
Hellenism of Ancient Macedonians (Thessaloniki: Pyromanos, 1994), 72, 199, 236, 237.
17. Marcus Templar, “Hellenic Migrations and Katadesmos” (paper presented at the Ninth Bien-
nial Conference on Greek Linguistics, University of Chicago, 30 October 2009).
18. Olivier Masson, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition (London: Oxford University Press,
1996), 905, 906, 1,996.
19. K. O. Müller, Über die Wohnsitz, die Abstammung und die ältere Geschichte des makedonischen
Volks (About the residence, descent, and other characteristics of the Macedonian people), cited in
Hadjidakis, 24, 25, 1,994.
20. Gustav Weigand, Ethnographie von Makedonien (Leipzig: F. Branstetter, 1924), cited in Had-
jidakis, 197, 204 – 7, 219 – 23, 1,994.
21. Antoine Meillet, Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque (Overview of the history of Greek)
(Paris: Libraire Klincksieck, 1930), 58, 250.

Macedonian was a northern dialect related to Aeolic Greek and Thessalian,
with the great majority of Macedonian words recovered being Greek.22 The
remaining seven scholars, including Nicholas Hammond and Masson, wrote
that the Macedonian was either a northwestern Greek dialect (part of the
Doric dialects) or Aeolic (part of the western Greek dialects).
Conclusion
After all the historical, linguistic, and archaeological facts amassed through
the years, is it really possible that the ancient Macedonians — bearing Greek
names and living in cities with Greek names, spoke a Doric Hellenic dialect
of the western type, shared myths and customs with other Greeks, served as
pillars to protect Greece from the barbarians, inscribed the Greek names of
their deceased relatives and friends on gravestones, prayed and sacrificed to
the Olympian gods placed by the other Greeks on Mt. Olympus in Macedonia,
brought the Hellenic civilization to the depths of Asia, and participated in
the Olympic games in which only Greeks were allowed to participate — were
not Greek?
In view of the overwhelming evidence supporting the Macedonians’ Helle-
nism, negating the contention that the Macedonians were barbarians speak-
ing a language incomprehensible to the other Greeks, it is sad that history
has reached the absurd and untenable point when a small country calling
itself “Republic of Macedonia” demands — by the power of an apprehended
name — not only to be recognized as Macedonia but also to be propelled as
the only Macedonia, and its Slavic people not only demand — by the power
granted to them by a powerful dictator — to be “some Macedonians,” but
audaciously claim recognition as the only Macedonians. It is also sad that
manipulations in politics, foreign or domestic, weigh heavier than the glori-
ous pages of Macedonian history and Hellenic Macedonianism.
The insistence of the FYROM Slavs to be called “Macedonians,” a name
dictatorially established and supported by communism’s brutal force and the-
oretical base sixty six years ago, clashes now with the age-old freedom of oth-
22. Otto Hoffmann, Die Makedonen: Ihre Sprache and ihr Volkstum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 1906).

ers (Hellenic Macedonians) to be called “Macedonians.” If FYROM consid-
ers itself Macedonia, it is a false and an audaciously daring step that brings
the origin of its Slavic people close to Philip and Alexander the Great.
Individuals, nongovernmental organizations, and several countries around
the world, including the United States, disregarded the overwhelming his-
torical evidence, the unjustified projection of a false “Macedonianism” by
FYROM, and the UN’s 1993 decision about a temporary name and rushed
to recognize the small state as “Republic of Macedonia” and its people as
“Macedonians.” The irony of US policy is that it assisted Greece in protect-
ing its territory in the 1940s and then, forgetting the blood spilled by the
Greek people to thwart communism’s advance to the Mediterranean Sea from
its extensive Balkan bases in the Iron Curtain, including Vardar Province,
turned around and recognized as “Macedonians” the people against whom
Greece was fighting with America’s help to preserve its territorial integrity
and freedom during the Greek Civil War. The irresponsible decision by the
United States to recognize FYROM in 2004 as “Republic of Macedonia”
contributed greatly to FYROM’s increasing intransigence and helped to
facilitate other countries to follow the path.
Emboldened by the rush of thoughtless or politically and financially moti-
vated recognitions, FYROM displayed naked intransigence during the fifteen
years of the Interim Accord in its dealings with Greece and the UN repre-
sentative attempting to negotiate the country’s name with Greece. Opting for
propaganda over dialogue, FYROM also mounted a well-prepared, calculated
smear campaign against Greece. Its leaders are now striving hard to sys-
tematically obliterate Macedonian Hellenism and undermine Greece’s name
and reputation, uttering, directly or indirectly, harsh accusations against it. A
good example of this is the Seventh Macedonian-North American Conference
on Macedonian Studies, held at the University of Utah, 5 – 9 November 2009,
during which distorted “facts” about Greece’s history and anti-Hellenic hate
and disparagement were exhibited.
Sadly, that is not all. A new, deceptive, nonmilitary but a highly dangerous
threat to Greece and Macedonian Hellenism is now on the surface, aiming
at destroying the Hellenic Macedonian identity and its historical heritage.
In order to confiscate the patrimony of ancient Macedonians, FYROM’s new
dogma is now pushing the origin of the modern Slavic “Macedonian” nation

not to the seventh century AD, when the Slavs migrated to the Balkans, but to
the fifth century BC, more than a millennium earlier. To redefine the myth of
the “Macedonian” nation’s identity and confiscate the Macedonian patrimony
and the archaeological inheritance, FYROM is now frantically using heroes
and other important people considered until now as Greeks or Bulgarians.
FYROM is also rushing to erect monuments (for example, a giant statue of
Alexander the Great in Skopje) and rename streets and airports with names
of ancient Greek and Bulgarian personalities and events.
Aware of FYROM’s attempts to confiscate Macedonian history, more than
346 scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity from all over the world wrote to Presi-
dent Barack Obama on 18 May 2009, requesting that he “clean up some of
the historical debris left by the Bush administration” in the Balkans.23 The
debris was President Bush’s decision to unilaterally recognize FYROM as the
“Republic of Macedonia” in 2004, violating the 1993 UN decision about a
temporary name and indirectly supporting the subversion of history. FYROM’s
use of the historic name “Macedonia” is “clearly not a force for historical
accuracy or for stability in the Balkans” but a brazen act provoking Greece
and raises future claims on Greek Macedonia, wrote the scholars. They also
suggested that the FYROM Slavs would be justified if they adopted the tradi-
tions and the name of ancient Paionians, whose land they occupy today.
FYROM must abandon the mentality of its communist past, an era that
produced hostile irredentist dogma toward its neighbors. It must abolish Arti-
cle 6 on the Law of Scientific Research Activity, published in the Official
Gazette of the Republic of Macedonia (no. 13/1996 and no. 29/2002) that
proscribes the initiation and promotion of scientific research on the national
identity of FYROM inhabitants in the twenty-first century. It must also
abandon the new FYROM dogma, recently promoted by the prime minister,
portraying its Slav-speaking population and the “Macedonian” brethren in
Greece and Bulgaria as non-Slavs, including impressions of racial superiority
and obsessions with genetic purity.
If FYROM wants to succeed in its so-far misguided journey to integration
with NATO and the EU, it must, first and foremost, discontinue its procras-
23. “Letter to President Barack Obama by More Than 340 Classicists,” 18 May 2009, macedonia
-evidence.org/obama-letter.html.

tination in finding a name acceptable to Greece. FYROM must also discon-
tinue portraying itself as Macedonia, stretching from Tetovo to the Bulgarian
capital in the north, down to Mt. Olympus in the south. If FYROM’s leaders
desire to integrate their landlocked, poor country with Europe, they must
reject, once and for all, their claims to the “Macedonian” identity. And as a
democracy in the twenty-first century, FYROM must base its foreign policy
on mutual respect and an understanding of its neighbors’ rights and histori-
cal tenets.

Macedonia, the truth

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